The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende

Analysis of Major Characters

Chapter 1, Rosa the Beautiful

Themes

The Struggle Between Classes

The major characters in The House of the Spirits come
from two opposing classes: the landed aristocracy and the peasants.
Most of the population of Latin America, as well as all of the characters
in the novel, belong to one of these two classes. Essentially the
only other class distinction that might be drawn is that occupied
by those in civil service. Peasants can join the police force or
the army and gain access to education and a higher class status,
which is the case of Esteban Garcia. The del Valle and Trueba families
represent the land-owning upper-class criollos (a criollo is a person
who is born and raised in South America but is a direct descendant
of Spaniards), while the Garcias represent the peasants. The two
classes come into conflict because one (upper) owns the land that
the other (lower) works on. Especially in rural areas such as Tres
Marias, the upper classes control all of the infrastructure, such
as schools, transportation, banks, and hospitals, as well as all
of the capital. As the upper classes prosper, conflict mounts when
that prosperity is not equally distributed.

Several different attitudes are presented toward this
inequality in The House of the Spirits. Esteban
Trueba represents the conservative view—that the status quo should
be maintained and that there is no reason for the peasants to share
in the upper class’s wealth or to change their situation. Pedro
Tercero Garcia represents the revolutionary peasants who will work
to make that change happen. The Trueba women, as well as Jaime,
support the peasants. This sets up an important alliance between
all of those who are subjugated by the patriarchal system.

Simply by making class struggle a major theme of the novel, The House
of the Spirits supports the view of the peasants: the conservatives
would not see class struggle as a problem, let alone a topic around
which to organize a novel. The third person narration of the story
is in fact given in the perspective of Alba, a staunch supporter of
the socialist revolution. Alba’s views also prevail in the retrospective
commentary of Esteban Trueba, who slowly comes to accept his granddaughter’s
position.

The Power of Women

The protagonists of the novel are all women who work in
different and subtle ways to assert their rights. The House
of the Spirits can be seen as a woman-centered response
to the paradigmatic text of magical realism: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Where One Hundred Years
of Solitude centers around three generations of men, with
the women whom they love as important but secondary characters, The
House of the Spirits does the opposite. Clara, Blanca,
and Alba remain the focus of the story, while Esteban, Pedro Tercero,
and Miguel enter the story because they are the men those women
love or marry. Experiences particularly central to the lives of
women dominate the minor as well as the major events in the story,
such as the detailed descriptions of each childbirth and the abortion,
as well as the presentation of physical and sexual violence against
women.

Aside from Nivea’s commitment to female suffrage, the
women rarely explicitly condemn gender inequality. Each woman’s
life is, however, marked by it. All of the women in The
House of the Spirits are strong women who do not bow to
mistreatment. They choose subtle responses the situations, though,
instead of outright revolt. This very method of resistance can be
seen as particularly feminine. If violence and activity are male
traits, while gentleness and passivity are female ones, The
House of the Spirits shows that this does not mean that
men accomplish things and change things while women do not. On the
contrary, the women in The House of the Spirits effect
more long-lasting and drastic changes than do any of the men. While
the men lead revolutions that topple governments, those revolutions
are themselves quickly toppled. The women’s subtler methods of teaching
literacy and basic healthcare, setting curses, and refusing to speak
are far more effective in exacting permanent change.

The Importance of Genealogy

Although genealogy is a subtle theme in the novel, it
is ultimately the source of the denouement. Almost all of the characters
in the story belong to either the del Valle-Trueba family, or else
to the Garcia family. The family name or genealogy to which each
character belongs determines her or his class position. Genealogy
does not, however, follow simply from biological parenting. In fact,
the bloodlines of the Trueba and Garcia families cross repeatedly,
but Esteban Trueba works hard to assure that their family names
and their genealogies do not. In the novel, it is less whose genes
you share and more the last name you carry that determines genealogy.
At the birth of each child, the question of last name is raised.
In addition, at each point that a character wishes to mark a drastic
shift in alliances away from their father or family, they change
their last name. Despite Esteban’s efforts to make genealogy by
name the only type of genealogy that matters, his refusal to acknowledge
some of his biological children ultimately comes back to haunt him.

Civilization vs. Barbarity

The unnamed country in The House of the
Spirits, like Allende’s native Chile, is divided
between modern city and largely undeveloped countryside, and between
an aristocratic and a peasant class, with little in between. One
of the oldest tropes or models for understanding the great divergences
in Latin American culture is that of culture versus nature or civilization
versus barbarity.

The traditional view of civilization and barbarity holds
that while nature is bountiful and has restorative powers, it is
barbaric and needs the influence of civilization in order to be
productive. This same view considers civilization the realm of the
upper classes and the cities; it is rational and well ordered. While
several of the characters in The House of the Spirits subscribe
to these traditional views, the novel works to break down any neat
divisions between civilization and barbarity. The beliefs and practices
of those who believe themselves to be civilized are shown to often
be inhumane, irrational, ineffective, and backward. At the same
time, the “barbaric” peasants demonstrate the most levelheaded,
successful responses to everything from natural disasters to politics.

Motifs

Writing

The House of the Spirits begins and ends
with the narrators referring explicitly to her use of Clara’s journals
in order to write the story at hand. Of course, the words of this
narrator were written by Isabel Allende. Allusions to Clara’s writing
pervade the novel. Special attention is given to the ways in which
each woman learns to write, and the moments when writing acquires
meaning in her life. Both Clara and Alba first learn how to write
and then learn how to use writing. Writing serves as testimony both
on a personal and on a political level, bearing witness to events
for the purpose of broadcasting them to a wider audience that may
be able to learn from or even remedy the events testified to. On
the personal level, Alba and other family members are able to piece
together their “true” family history based on Clara’s writings;
on the political level, Alba is able to testify to the abuses of
power of the military regime through her writing. Alba’s writing
is also a metaphor for Isabel Allende’s writing of The House
of the Spirits as a testimony to events that took place
in her native Chile during her lifetime.

Fate

Chance or strange twists of fate recur repeatedly in The
House of the Spirits. These are thematized in Clara’s clairvoyance,
which allows her to understand people’s fates and to predict the
future. They also structure the plot, which revolves around the
encounters and reencounters of members of the del Valle-Trueba family
and the Garcia family with each other and with their natural and
political environment. Each of the romantic couples in the novel
meets seemingly by chance at a young age and years later realizes
that things were meant to be. Just as loves return and persist through
a strange combination of chance and design, so do other connections,
such as friendships and debts. Although Clara must come to realize
that she can predict but not change the future, fate is not an entirely
arbitrary experience in The House of the Spirits.
Rather, each character’s fate is the result of all of their actions,
great and small, just as the country’s fate is determined by the
particular combination of political influences that those characters
exert.

Symbols

The Big House on the Corner

Esteban builds a big house on the corner that on the surface
is straightforward, if somewhat ostentatious. Similarly, The
House of the Spirits can be read as a traditional romance
novel, following a single family over several generations. However,
Esteban’s house ends up full of complicated and impractical additions.
Despite its apparently traditional structure, The House
of the Spirits contains an enormous number of complicated
twists of plot. The title of the novel underlines the association: The
House of the Spirits refers both to the book as a whole,
and also to the big house on the corner, which, thanks to Clara,
is always full of ghosts and spirits.